Shibumi by Trevanian Page A

that explained it. All sorts of strange people go to the château ever since that foreigner bought it! Not that M. Hel was a bad man. Indeed, their husbands had told them he was much admired by the Basque freedom movement. But still… he was a newcomer. No use denying it. He had lived in the château only fourteen years, while everyone else in the village (ninety-three souls) could find his name on dozens of gravestones around the church, sometimes newly cut into pyrenean granite, sometimes barely legible on ancient stone scrubbed smooth by five centuries of rain and wind. Look! The hussy has not even bound her breasts! She wants men to look at her, that’s what it is! She will have a nameless child if she is not careful! Who would marry her then? She will end up cutting vegetables and scrubbing floors in the household of her sister. And her sister’s husband will pester her when he is drunk! And one day, when the sister is too far along with child to be able to do it, this one will succumb to the husband! Probably in the barn. It always happens so. And the sister will find out, and she will drive this one from the house! Where will she go then? She will become a whore in Bayonne, that’s what!
    A third woman joined the two. Who is that girl showing her legs? We know nothing about her—except that she is a whore from Bayonne. And not even Basque! Do you think she might be a Protestant? Oh no, I wouldn’t go that far. Just a poor
putain
who has slept with the husband of her sister. It is what always happens, if you go about with your breasts unbound.
    True, true.
    As she passed, Hannah looked up and noticed the three women.
“Bonjour, mesdames,”
she said.
    “Bonjour, mademoiselle,”
they chanted together, smiling in the open Basque way. “You are giving yourself a walk?” one asked.
    “Yes, Madame.”
    “That’s nice. You are lucky to have the leisure.”
    An elbow nudged, and was nudged back. It was daring and clever to come so close to saying it.
    “You are looking for the château, Mademoiselle?”
    “Yes, I am.”
    “Just keep going as you are, and you will find what you’re looking for.”
    A nudge; another nudge. It was dangerous, but deliciously witty, to come so close to saying it.
    Hannah stood before the heavy iron gates. There was no one in sight, and there did not seem to be any way of ringing or knocking. The château was set back a hundred meters, up a long curving allée of trees. Uncertain, she decided to try one of the smaller gates down the road, when a voice behind her asked in a singsong, “Mademoiselle?”
    She returned to the gate where an old gardener in blue working apron was peering out from the other side of the barrier. “I am looking for M. Hel,” she explained.
    “Yes,” the gardener said, with that inhaled
“oui”
that can mean almost anything, except yes. He told her to wait there, and he disappeared into the curving row of trees. A minute later she heard the hinges creak on one of the side gates, and he beckoned her with a rolling arm and a deep bow that almost cost him his balance. As she passed him, she realized that he was half-drunk. In fact, Pierre was never drunk. Also, he was never sober. The regular spacing of his daily twelve glasses of red protected him from either of those excesses.
    Pierre pointed the way, but did not accompany her to the house; he returned to trimming the box hedges that formed a labyrinth. He never worked in haste, and he never avoided work, his day punctuated, refreshed, and blurred by his glass of red every half hour or so.
    Hannah could hear the clip-clip-clip of his shears, the sound receding as she walked up the allée between tall blue-green cedars, the drooping branches of which wept and undulated, brushing the shadows with long kelplike sweeps. A susurrant wind hissed high in the trees like tide over sand, and the dense shade was chill. She shivered. She was dizzy after the long hot walk, having taken nothing but coffee all day